Please briefly discuss some of the supervisory considerations regarding the recovering supervisee.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Some suggested that their addiction and recovery experiences allow them to quickly and accurately understand their clients, but there is no evidence linking recovery status (recovering or non-recovering) to addiction counselor effectiveness (White, 2000). However, Madson and Green (2012) argued that personal addiction and recovery experience can also be a detriment to effective counseling. Specifically, they argued that recovering clinicians might make assumptions that they understand the client and that these clients have similar addiction and recovery experiences. Consequently, these counselors could experience issues of countertransference and not accurately engage with the client. Furthermore, counselors in recovery may require support to maintain their recovery. This is because counselors in recovery could relapse. Thus, relapse is an issue that a supervisor would need to monitor (Culbreth & Borders, 1999). But it is critical to emphasize that an “impaired” counselor is not a concept limited only to addictions. Counselors are human beings who come to the profession with various personal issues of their own. Counselors can “relapse” with other issues, such as another episode of major depressive disorder. Just like with the supervisor working with the recovering counselor perhaps struggling with a potential relapse, the supervisor of the counselor slipping into another depressive episode needs to be supportive, honest, and vigilant in order to best serve the interests of the counselor and his or her client(s).